I recently had occasion to expose the absurdity of Bruce Allen Murphy’s assertion, in his cartoonish and incompetent new biography of Justice Scalia, that Scalia’s “extrajudicial speeches and conduct … ventured far beyond those of any other justice, including Abe Fortas, who was forced to resign from the Court.” As I pointed out, Murphy himself, in his published entry on “Extrajudicial Activities” in the Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (2008), had described conduct of Fortas’s that was far removed from even Murphy’s most tendentious claims about Scalia. Fortas had helped LBJ “draft pieces of legislation,” had “revise[d] State of the Union addresses in the Oval Office,” had “served as Johnson’s secret emissary to the Dominican Republic during a 1965 coup,” had discussed with LBJ “issues then under consideration by the Supreme Court,” and had agreed to payment to serve on a foundation funded by Louis Wolfson, whose appeal of his criminal conviction was pending in federal court.
It turns out that there’s still more on Fortas. According to this National Law Journal article (registration required for access, I think), Villanova law professor Tuan Samahon has discovered through FOIA requests that in 1966 Abe Fortas was (in Samahon’s words) “involved as LBJ’s toady helping [FBI deputy director] Cartha DeLoach investigate a would-be son-in-law to find derogatory information about him.” The “would-be son-in-law” who was dating LBJ’s daughter was Hollywood actor George Hamilton.
The article also discusses another FBI memo about an alleged relationship between Fortas and a teenaged male prostitute, but the evidence seems dubious.
By the way, on the Wolfson scandal, a reader calls to my attention that Fortas’s conduct appears to have been much worse than Murphy’s Encyclopedia entry suggests. Among other things, as a 1977 Washington Post article by Bob Woodward spells out, a transcript of a conversation that Wolfson had with Fortas (and that Wolfson secretly recorded) indicates that in April 1969 Fortas, while still a justice, solicited LBJ to issue Wolfson a pardon. The transcript also indicates that Fortas initially planned to decline LBJ’s proposed nomination of him to the Court in 1965 because of the financial sacrifice that moving from private practice to the Court would entail but that Wolfson’s offer of financial assistance to Fortas led him to change his mind and accept the nomination. (Murphy’s biography of Fortas, which I haven’t read, might well address these matters.)